Steam
by Esther Kirkland
Summary: John is angry. Sherlock is dead, Mycroft is cold and aloof, and the press has made "Sherlock Holmes" synonymous with "fraud". Everyone grieves in their own way, and John's temper isn't making it easy for him. How long can he last before the volcano blows its top? 2,100 words, complete. NO SLASH


It's a scientific fact: heating water causes it to evaporate. Heating water to high temperatures causes it to evaporate at a quicker rate.

Which must explain why John couldn't seem to cry, even though he had a vague notion that he was probably supposed to. He teared up a bit—ok. So he actually cried for a few seconds—at Sherlock's grave when he took Mrs. Hudson there to put flowers on the tombstone. But that was the last of it. His therapist would probably tell him he was bottling it up. It wasn't that he was bottling it up inside him, though…it was just that it kept steaming away.

He was so _angry_. Curse it all to the depths of someplace really hot, he was so furious it was enough to almost scare him. If he had any room left for being scared, which he didn't.

He was angry. Furious. Enraged. Fuming. Incensed. Think of the angriest word you've ever heard, the word that means the most I've-got-nothing-left-to-lose-fury, and multiply it by a million degrees. He was angry with himself, for not having guessed; angry with Moriarty for daring to take the one thing he had in the entire world; angry with Sherlock for not telling him, for not _bloody_ giving him a chance to help; angry with Mycroft for being so stupid and careless and cold; angry with the whole world because they all believed—they all wanted to believe, which was even worse—that Sherlock Holmes was a fraud and a fake and deserved whatever heaps of derision they desired to shovel onto his freshly-turned grave. He was so angry he could actually feel the heat of it coming off his face, rolling out in waves of heat like the sun on summer pavement.

No wonder he couldn't cry.

Salt water evaporates differently than fresh, though. Salt water leaves a crust, a deposit of something hard and crumbly where the water once was. The crust kept building, and there was never any rain—fresh, cooling rain—to rinse it away.

John went to the park and ran, hoping the wind in his face would cool his rage. He went to the gym and lifted weights in hopes of sweating it out; he punched a bag for hours thinking that he might be able to work all the anger he felt into the unfeeling leather. He dove into the pool and swam underwater for as long as he could hold his breath, even—for a brief instant that terrified him later—contemplating the idea that the water could flood his lungs, fill him up from the inside, and _that_ might finally lower his core temperature to a livable one.

He was a doctor. He knew all about fevers. Knew that he needed to stay hydrated—but no matter how much water he drank, the clear liquid evaporated away long before it reached his tear ducts.

He was a soldier. He knew all about heat. Knew that he needed to conserve liquid and keep his body temperature low if he was going to survive this desert.

But he was so angry. So furiously angry that nothing seemed to dampen the heat, nothing could cool him down. Even if he _could_ cry, it would take days—if not weeks—of tears to tamp down the flames of fury that writhed around him. He felt as if the people around him ought to back away, make room for him to pass. He was afraid to sit in one place for too long, for fear it would spontaneously combust into flames.

He knew how to keep his temper. Heaven knows, living with the social disaster that was Sherlock Holmes was enough to teach any man to hone his emotions and keep his frustration in check. But the anger was enough to crack him sometimes, like lava seeping out from the black-hard rocks of a stifled volcano.

He needed to get away. Needed to get out of London. He could feel the pressure building inside sometimes, at night, when he lay in his bed and felt his skin grow papery and crinkle at a touch. He was going to burst into flames if he stayed here much longer. He had internal injuries that were bleeding out from his heart, daily cauterized and nightly reopened by the nightmares. He hadn't had a decent night's sleep in months. For a while, he had taken sleep meds, but quickly discovered that the only thing worse than constantly waking up from nightmares is having nightmares and being unable to wake up.

He needed to get out of London before he blew his top.

Without much of a plan, John packed an overnight bag with a toothbrush and a change of clothes, and left. He didn't tell anyone where he was going, barely remembering to leave a note at the clinic saying he'd be out a few days.

He left his mobile phone on the desk in his room.

When he thought back on it later, he really had no memory of how or why he ended up where he did, or even how long it took him to get there. He felt as though his entire attention was focused on keeping the lid on his temper; he had no way to release the pressure, and the anger he felt just continued to grow. When he checked in to the hotel in Lyme Regis, he only had a vague notion that he was glad to be near the sea.

It was a grey afternoon, one of those days when the sky is like a fat cat's belly hanging low over your head, furry and soft and muffling and you might be suffocated by its bulk at any second. Once, it had been the sort of day John liked to spend either curled up in his armchair with a thriller and a mug of something hot, or huddled over a pile of evidence helping Sherlock sift through it. The thrillers now usually failed to hold his attention, and without Sherlock's indomitable brains and arrogance, Scotland Yard was no place for an ex-army-doctor.

After ten minutes of alternately lying on his bed and pacing the room, John couldn't stand it anymore. He had to get outside, dreary weather or no. He left the hotel and walked down the steeply graded road, heading toward the crashing sound of the sea. The pier that led out into the grey water seemed to beckon to him, inviting him out to this place, half-sea, half-land; a place apart from places.

He made his way out to the very end of the pier and stood, watching the spray fly up as the waves crashed against the rocks below and feeling the salty droplets against his face. The wind off the water was strong, billowing against his trouser legs and coat and making him wave slightly to keep his balance.

Looking down at the rocks, John was suddenly aware of just how _real_ everything was here. How frail and transient he felt, juxtaposed against these stones that had been there longer than he had been alive and would continue to stand long after he and his descendents had passed. A memory of another grey day, much like this one, in the middle of London, flashed through his mind. Another coat flapping in the wind, and the garish smear of red across a spray-white face.

How easy it would be, he thought with an involuntary shudder, for a wave to simply sweep him from his perch, a sudden gust of wind to knock him off his balance. He would go flying, as light as any feather carried by the breeze and as helpless, landing in the water below to be crushed against the hard stone. Water and stone were merciless—not anti-human, but un-human to the smallest molecule. They bore him no direct ill will, but they would feel nothing, would care not a whit, if he were to fall—or be pushed, or jump—and be dashed against the rocks. In a way, that was somehow comforting. The world, all of nature in all of its glory and terror and inhuman strength, would go on perfectly well without him. He was not a vital cog in the clockwork of nature—and for that matter, neither was Sherlock. For all that the man sometimes had acted as though he was the center of the universe, and for all that he had truly become the center fixture in John's life…The world went on without him. The waves still beat upon the shore, the wind still blew, and the seabirds never ceased their calling as they wheeled in the sky above John's head.

The wind continued to gust, and the spray continued to fly into his face as he stood there, and after a long while John's rage, the heat inside of him, began to fade—or rather, not to fade, but to dissipate. It wasn't disappearing, it was dissolving. It tore away in ever-thinner strips, melting into the chill air and the salty spray like smoke in a stiff wind. Somehow, the realization that the world went on without Sherlock—and that it was alright, it was natural, it was _fine_—lessened John's anger.

Was he still angry that Sherlock hadn't told him, hadn't given him a chance to change the detective's mind? Of course. It was an utterly rubbish thing for one friend to do to another, the most selfish thing John had ever come across. But Sherlock was Sherlock. Selflessness was a somewhat foreign language to the late detective.

Was he still angry at Mycroft, for his incredible stupidity and callous coldness? Of course. And there were no real excuses there, save that Mycroft was almost as much a stranger to the world of feeling as Sherlock, if not more so.

Was he still angry with the press, who even now—months after the fact—smeared Sherlock Holmes at every opportunity, until the name was nearly synonymous with "fake" and "phony"? Yes. And there were certainly no mitigating circumstances to that one.

But he wasn't angry with the world anymore, and he wasn't enraged that it continued to go on regardless of his feelings on the matter. It still felt odd, to think that when he returned to the streets of London, there would be no dark-coated shadow to follow, no bright mind to try and understand, and no impatient voice bemoaning his lack of intelligence. It seemed to him as though the world ought to have stopped that day outside the hospital, and stayed gray and cold and damp forever, slashed through with a bright ribbon of agonizing red.

But the world hadn't ground to a halt. And it was high time he stopped dragging his feet and rejoined it. Life, nature, the world…They went on. Even as he thought this, there was a break in the cloud cover overhead, and for just an instant the sun burst through, like a medieval painting where Heaven shone down on a supplicant saint. John lifted his face to the light, feeling its brief heat on his face. A small, tired smile tugged at his lips.

"John?"

He didn't move for a long second, his mind not registering that the word was an actual sound, made by a human throat, and not simply a memory.

"John."

John's heart stopped, and he didn't move, his head still slightly tilted skyward, eyes closed.

Then, slowly opening his eyes, he turned, and looked down.

Sherlock Holmes stood on the lower level of the stone pier, his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, looking up at John with a strange expression that could have been concern or gladness or some chimera-like combination of the two.

John barked a laugh, and shook his head. Bewilderment, anger, disbelief, and pain warred in his heart, but as he blinked at the tall, damp, very-not-dead detective and realized that this was no hallucination, no dream, no fancy of a fevered mind, the one emotion that came to the fore was joy—as bright a shaft of delight through his heart as the beam of sunlight through the clouds. There were a million things he could have said, and probably a million more that would need to be said. But all that came from his lips in that first moment, as the waves burst into glittering shards of spray around him and another sudden gush of steam billowed away on the wind to be forgotten, was:

"You should be really glad you didn't get here about twenty minutes ago."

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**A/N**: Maybe it's just me, but I feel like, as a fandom, we have brought the Baker Street Duo down to our level a bit. Post-Reichenbach, we've made our Sherlock too soft and prone to emotions, and we've made our John too weak and broken. But John is a strong man—and he has a temper. I wanted to explore the idea that he is more angry with Sherlock's death than anything, and this is what came of it. Do tell me what you think — reviews are my fountains of happy dancing. :D


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